If you want to generate more traffic, leads and sales from your social media marketing efforts, Instagram is the social network you must focus on. As it drives the highest engagement among the top social networks.
Marketing on Instagram has become so popular that it has led to the invention of hundreds of Instagram marketing tools and apps. These tools can make it easy for you to market yourself on Instagram, but finding the right ones can take a lot of effort.
Therefore, to simplify this task for you, I have compiled a list of the 11 best Instagram marketing tools out there. You should be able to use these tools even if you are on a tight budget as many of the ones listed here can be accessed for free.
#1 Shoutcart:
If you want to achieve quick growth on Instagram, Influencer marketing and shoutouts should be an important part of your strategy. If you can find the right Instagram influencers and convince them to give your account a shoutout, you will quickly gain followers and sales.
Finding these influencers can take a bit of work. Therefore, you can use a tool like Shoutcart to hasten the process.
Shoutcart is an influencer outreach tool where you can find hundreds and thousands of influencers who are ready to work with you. To make it easy for you to find these influencers, Shoutcart categorizes the influencers and displays the success and engagement scores of the accounts.
These metrics will ensure that you only work with influencers who bring highly positive results. Shoutcart can also be used to find influencers on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
#2 Canva:
If you want to succeed on Instagram, you need to create the best images. Not everyone has the natural talent to create quality images quickly. And most people don’t want to spend hours figuring out how to use advanced image design tools like Photoshop. This is why a great alternative you can try using is Canva.
Canva is an easy to use online image design tool that helps anyone create quality images in minutes. It comes with templates that can be used to create images for regular posts and Stories.
#3 Renderforest:
The only type of content other than images that you can publish on Instagram is video. It is actually more beneficial for you to create more videos than images as a study from Mention found that videos drive more likes and comments than images on Instagram.
But the problem with creating videos is that they take up a lot of time. This is why you should sign up for an easy to use online video maker like Renderforest. It comes with templates and an editor that will help you set up your videos very quickly.
By combining both Canva and Renderforest you would be able to create a month’s worth of content in a day or two. Both have free plans, so you should be able to do this free.
#4 BrandMentions
BrandMentions is a social listening tool designed to help you monitor the online presence of your brand online and understand the behavior of your audience so you can generate a better content strategy.
Use it to track top perfoming hashtags on Instagram, spy on your competitors, find our who mentioned you on Instagram. The tool has lots of other advantages:
- Find out who is saying what about you online with real-time email alerts
- Track sentiment analysis and understand the tone of conversations you are mentioned in
- Get in-depth insights on any brand, competitor, or topic
- Track hashtags and monitor hashtag performance.
- Identify top influencers and top websites that talk about you and your competition.
- Perform competitive analysis. Research new content ideas.
- Best for: Business owners, social media managers, and agencies who want to stay on top of their online image
#5 Stories Ads:
Along with creating content for the regular feed, you should also be creating content for your Instagram stories. Stories drive a ton of engagement quickly. As they run for a short period of time, more people want to see them. You can also share links in your stories unlike with regular posts, therefore they can help drive more traffic and sales.
If you find it hard to create Instagram stories, you should use Stories Ads.
It makes it easy to create Instagram story ads. But you can use it to create organic stories as well. It comes with templates and an intuitive video editor that suggests changes to the video. It is free for use for a limited time now. But in the future you will probably need to pay to use it.
#6 Later:
Using an Instagram scheduling tool is extremely important. As you need to publish posts on a regular basis and at your best times. If you do this manually there is always the possibility that you will forget. This is why if you should use a scheduling tool and schedule your posts in advance. You will always have a steady stream of posts going live.
To schedule these posts, you can use Later as it is free.
Their free plan lets you schedule up to 30 posts every month. So, you can plan posts for your entire month with it.
It has several other important features that make it very easy to create engaging Instagram posts.
#7 SocialBakers:
To create better Instagram posts, you need to know what types of posts are currently working for you. To find out this information you can use SocialBakers.
They have a free Instagram tracker tool that can be used on both personal and business accounts. It shows you what your most popular posts re. You can use this data to create better posts in the future.
#8 Cyfe:
Another social media analytics tool you should try using is Cyfe.
It can be used to not only analyse your account, but your competitors accounts as well. You simply add the usernames of your competitors by creating a widget on this tool and it will show you which of the posts are getting the most engagement. Cyfe can be used for free too.
#9 Shortstack:
Contests should be a part of your Instagram marketing strategy as they can help you gain both followers and leads quickly even if you have a small budget. To run these contests you can use Shortstack.
It makes it very easy to set up and automate Instagram contests and giveaways. It has many more wonderful features that can be highly beneficial for your Instagram strategy.
#10 Rebrandly
Rebrandly is a URL shortener that lets you create shortened branded URLs. These can make really long links from your website look more neat and professional.
It even tracks clicks. This can be used to check how many people are clicking on your links. So, shorten your URLs with Rebrandly and add them to your bio, Instagram stories links and IGTV description links.
Rebrandly also lets you attach your ad pixel to your shortened links. You can take advantage of this to boost your retargeting ad reach.
#11 Split.link
Your Instagram account’s bio URL plays a key role. The bio URL is more important here than on any other network. This is because on other networks you are allowed to share links in your posts. Whereas here you aren’t allowed to. It makes it hard to drive traffic.
So, using a tool like Split.link is very necessary.
It lets you create a special landing page where links to multiple sources (you own) can be added. You can then share this link in your bio instead of just simply adding a link to one website.
Conclusion:
These are the top Instagram marketing tools you should be using. All the tools listed above either offer free plans or trials. Therefore, I recommend that you sign up for all of them and try them out.
Do you use any of the above Instagram marketing tools? Did I forget to add any important tools? Please leave your comments below.
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